Monday, April 27, 2009

MSC Malaysia Open Source Software Conference(MSCOSCONF2009) is an open source conference that will be held in Malaysia on 31 May - 3 June, 2009, organized by MAMPU and MDEC of Malaysia. There will be great speakers presenting their stuff on the event, great activities and much more. For further details, visit http://www.mscmalaysia.my/osconf and http://www.mscoscon.my.

Friday, April 10, 2009

I faced this problem when trying to install the latest version of lyx, frontend for the famous LaTeX/TeX document processor. Lyx is available at the ubuntu main repo, but the version is kind of outdated. After checking at http://www.getdeb.net, a latest version is available. After downloading the lyx and lyx-common package from here, I tried to install both of them using "dpkg -i *.deb" but they have unsatisfied dependencies. One of the way to solve this is to download all the dependencies and put them inside one directory, and run "dpkg -i *.deb" but I think I wanna try another solution which is using apt to install them. This is where "Adding local directory to apt sources.list" comes into the picture. The steps will be explained below:

1. Create the directory to put all the deb files you downloaded, in this case I'll create /home/foo/debs$ mkdir /home/foo/debs

2. Put all the downloaded deb files into the directory$ mv /home/foo/Desktop/*.deb /home/foo/debs

3. Check the current priorities and section for the package, find entry named Section and Priority:$ dpkg --info lyx_1.6.2-1~getdeb1_i386.deb

Here are some of the info:Package: lyxSection: editorsPriority: optionalHomepage: http://www.lyx.org/

4. Create override file. Override file is used to override the default priority and section setting of the package (refer to no. 3 for guide on how to check section and priority). Override file contains 3 columns: package, priority, section. Package is the name of the package, priority is low, medium, high or optional and section is the section to which it belongs.Example of override file content:

6. If you are too lazy to do the override file, you do not have to. Just change the "dpkg --scanpackages" command above to this:$ cd /home/foo/debs$ sudo dpkg-scanpackages . /dev/null | gzip -c9 > Packages.gzIf you follow this path, ignore step 4 and 5